It's Happening!

The City State Entertainment (CSE) Camelot Unchained (CU) update from September 9th landed with authority! What you are seeing in the lead in image isn’t just players on one island looking across to another. It’s players on one SERVER looking across to another SERVER! Did I mention they will soon be able to fight across those servers? That is just the first in what is a stout top seven development accomplishments plucked from the September 9th Update.

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#1. First pass testing of multi-island/multi-server integration happened just yesterday. Players will be able to cast abilities, use siege engines, etc. between totally different servers and zones. This will allow us not only to bring about the moving islands, but also to add entirely different and unique situations for RvR.

The easiest number one I’ve ever had to rank! This, is, HUGE! In the old day’s servers were isolated instances. You could not see nor move between them. CSE is turning them into moving islands/continents that share a ocean which exists on the larger planet that is the game world!

Between us when CSE first announced the moving island concept I wasn’t confident they would be able to pull it off, well, it looks like they are about to! Feasibly I could terraform (build upon) an island until it resembled a mega fortress then ride that fort across the ocean as the island migrated to my realm’s part of the world! Inconceivable! This is a giant leap in developmental progress. Ron Paul may have said it best “It's Happening!”.

#2. Tyler finished up an initial pass of the “Autumn fantasy biome” right before hopping into a car to drive to Dragon Con.

I love how fall looks in real life, I love how it looks in game and I’m still giddy about how CU forests function! The forests literally create deep dark woods as the canopy thickens. I smiled just typing that. So much PVP potential! In the beginning I assumed CU graphics would be pretty...how do I put it nicely, old school (aka ugly)! They are far better than I imagined, especially considering the kind of numbers they are putting up during tests.

#3. We revealed our new logo and title treatment. We’re all very excited to share this with you. Check it out on our Patcher!

As a self-proclaimed fanboy of trees I liked the old logo (pours libations). I’d call it a great video logo but outside of that format it had issues scaling. Moving forward CSE needed a logo that was more widely functional. The new logo is just that. It’s a very good logo but I have to get micro on it because in a past life I was a logo whisperer. I spoke to them and they spoke to me. I was even the best man in a logo’s wedding. He married an impressively curvy ampersand that gave him all that he could handle!

I'd be interested in seeing the wing on the C get longer and thin and wrap around the bottom of the C a bit more but as is it's a great lead character and will be a solid logo mark as no doubt intended. The problem I have is the rest of the characters look a bit shy because of the C being such a show-off! Nothing is worse than character envy! They can be such divas.

I’d like to see the other characters get some scale ridges like the C. That would help everyone get along. Lastly the kerning on Camelot is pretty tight and when scaled down, like on the embedded photos, it becomes a bit hard to read. To compensate for its smaller stature, the kerning has been significantly widened on Unchained, as a result I’m actually reading it a bit better than the word Camelot at smaller sizes. Increasing the kerning on Camelot would also give Unchained some room to scale up a bit so it doesn’t look quite so shy itself. I wouldn’t mind seeing Unchained get scale ridges as well. There it is. Add some scale ridges and adjust some kerning. As a friend once said “I’m nit picking and when I’m nit picking it’s probably fine as is.”. I’m kidding, we all know PVP MMORPGers don’t have friends.

#4. Added more functionality to archery abilities by adding “Aim” and “Target” parts to ability network. These allow our archer classes to not only use specific class abilities but target specific body parts to apply those effects to.

As an archer fan the ability to target specific body parts is straight up cool. I loved picking mind, body or energy and speccing a character to focus fire one of those health pools in Star Wars Galaxies. It added a ton of depth to combat and class creation. CU sounds like it will be that X-1000 (not to be confused with T-1000). I can’t wait to shoot arrows at people’s exposed knees!

#5. Armor now works on sub body parts.

CURSES! Foiled again! I guess I’ll settle for armored knees.

#6. Buildings can now be damaged with the new ability system.

I’ve seriously doubted I’d be a MMORPG fan long enough to see it come to fruition. It just might happen before I tap out and ride my TaunTaun off into the game-free sunset.

#7. Everything else.

By that I mean CSE had several other bullet points but I think I can sum them up as “the game is becoming a full-fledged MMORPG”. That was a helluva good update as things continue to snowball. May 2, 2013 seems like a lifetime ago. Many grays later I’ve had my doubts and while I know there will be more bumps in the road I can’t help but feel like we are past the critical point when a major setback might sink the good ship Camelot as it sails to Beta and eventually launch, fire mages be damned.

Tim Eisen /
I roleplay a wordsmith that writes about the technological and social evolution within the game industry